This is very interesting...I got this in my email this morning. I wonder if they used an AMS provided list? I wasn't aware that the AMS statement on climate change was up for renewal/reworking. I, for one, will consider cancelling membership if they take any sort of hard-line approach.

San Francisco, CA – A new campaign, Forecast the Facts (www.forecastthefacts.org), launches Sunday to pressure TV meteorologists to inform their viewers about climate change. The launch coincides with the kick-off of the American Meteorological Society’s (AMS) annual meeting in New Orleans, LA.

The campaign will deliver thousands of petition signatures that demand the AMS pass a strong statement on climate change. The current statement—drafted in 2007—is set to expire on Feb1. In the five years since, scientific consensus about climate change has grown even stronger, and the Forecast the Facts campaign is urging the AMS to reflect that consensus in their new information statement. The new statement, drafted by a panel of experts, requires approval by the 21-member AMS Council, which convenes on Sunday, January 22 at their annual meeting.

“This is an important moment in the history of the AMS,” said Daniel Souweine, the campaign’s director. “It’s well known that large numbers of meteorologists are climate change deniers. It’s essential that the AMS Council resist pressure from these deniers and pass the strong statement currently under consideration.”

In the coming months the campaign plans to launch a full-fledged initiative to educate and activate communities at the local level. Grassroots outreach efforts will include a robust and creative online and offline engagement campaign, including video, advertising, and activist tool-kits, among other interactive elements.

The issue of climate change denial among television weather reporters has gained increasing attention of late, especially with the release of a national study by George Mason University in March 2010. The study found that 63% of T.V. meteorologists think climate change is due to natural causes, and a full 27% think global warming is a scam.

The AMS is the leading national organization for meteorologists, with over 14,000 members. Its information statements are “intended to provide a trustworthy, objective and scientifically up-to-date explanation of scientific issues of concern to the public at large.“ According to the George Mason study, meteorologists trust information from the AMS more than almost any other source, including climate researchers, making the AMS statement on climate change a closely watched document in the meteorological community.

Recent increases in extreme weather have added further impetus for meteorologists to report on climate change. In 2011, the United States experienced a record twelve “billion-dollar” extreme weather events, including flooding from Hurricane Irene, unprecedented tornadoes in the Midwest, and crippling droughts and wildfires in the Southwest. Most scientists believe that climate change exacerbates extreme weather, a conclusion affirmed by the International Panel on Climate Change’s November 2011 report on the subject.

Mr. Daniel Souweine's statements reek of arrogance and pompousity. I think most of us 'weather reporters' and 'global warming deniers' think there is way too many unknowns to outright claim it is or it isn't caused by humans.

What a website they have there. Looks like the anthropogenic warming argument is going to be heating up. They're even quoting 'weather reporters' on there.

An who is this AMS you speak of?

In their own words

"It has been claimed that global warming is responsible for an increasing number of tropical storms and hurricanes, but here is a reason that the number of storms is increasing that has absolutely nothing to do with global warming...any increase in the number of hurricanes observed over the last 100 years is only the result of the fact that we have more ships at sea, more people living on coastlines, and satellites to see storms now that would have gone unrecorded 50 or 75 years ago. "

Joseph Sobel of AccuWeather State College, PA

source: NewsBusters.org 05/10/2007

"The climate is always changing and has been since day one" and will continue to do so.We have been in a warmer-than-average pattern for the last 10 to 15 years. That cycle is now just starting to flip to a colder-than-average pattern that will last 15 to 20 years, although there will be some blips in this pattern."

Dave Murray of KTVI-TV St. Louis, MO

source: St. Louis Journalism Review 03/01/2009

"The worst case scenario, which is the extreme end, which is the least likely to happen, says seven or eight degrees. Yeah, then we'd have problems. But that is probably about the chance that I'm going to step outside right now on a February day and get struck by lightning"

Karl Bohnak of WLUC-TV Marquette, MI

source: Valley Central 02/18/2010

"You can look at what's going into the atmosphere and we see it's having an effect on components of the atmosphere. But there's nobody who can tell you what that means."

Denis Phillips of WFTS-TV Tampa , FL

source: St. Petersburg Times 03/14/2010

"We’re in a cooling trend. The sun has gone quiet. Those guys in Canada and Russia were talking about an ice age."

John Coleman of KUSI-TV San Diego, CA

source: KUSI 03/20/2008

"I do not know of a single TV meteorologist who buys into the man-made global warming hype."

James Spann of WBMA-TV Birmingham, AL

source: ABC 33/40 WeatherBlog 01/18/2007

"The Earth’s climate has changed since the day God put it here. We’ve had these cyclical changes, and I believe most of this is purely natural."

James Spann of WBMA-TV Birmingham, AL

source: Glenn Beck Show 01/22/2007

"Al Gore's movie-Inconveniently NOT the truth....I too drank the KoolAid before that movie"

Justin Berk of WMAR-TV Baltimore, MD

source: Facebook 02/20/2011

"The Earth is not warming, sea levels are not rising, global ice masses are actually starting to grow."

Kevin Williams of WHEC-TV Rochester, NY

source: Tea Party Rally 04/15/2010

"Natural climate cycles were going on well before people were around or could have even dreamed of having any effect. "

Bill Meck of WLEX-TV Lexington, KY

source: Bill's Weather Blog 11/20/2009

"There was a disheartening article though regading the teaching of ‘climate change’ in our schools. Thanks goodness it’s not required and there is one passage in the article that needs to be corrected. The 3rd paragraph says ‘most scientists believe it’s the most pressing issue facing the planet’. That’ s simply not true. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of meteorological and climate scientists that have other opinions. "

Bill Meck of WLEX-TV Lexington, KY

source: Bill's Weather Blog 10/01/2009

"My life would be easier if I was a believer! All my non-meteorologist friends are global warming adherents. Faith doesn’t come to you just because it’s a desirable trait."

Geoff Fox of WTIC-TV Hartford , CT

source: GeoffFox.com 06/22/2011

"When somebody sees some global warming…please send it our way."

Bill Meck of WLEX-TV Lexington, KY

source: Bill's Weather Blog 06/04/2009

"It is pretty widely accepted that the earth has been cooling for the past several years..."

Dave Dahl of KSTP-TV Minneapolis, MN

source: Minnesota Post 09/26/2008

"Simply put, the mathematical correlation between an increase in atmospheric CO2 and temperature is very weak"

Herb Stevens of WLNE Providence, RI

source: New York Times 01/24/2008

"I’ve spent a lot of time in the last 10 years researching this matter. It is the greatest hoax perpetrated on mankind."

Herb Stevens of WLNE Providence, RI

source: TomNelson.Blogspot.com 09/25/2008

"Next time you hear someone tell you Co2 is a pollutant, please correct them. Not only is it not a pollutant, it is what makes green plants green. It is a critical component of life"

He's a regular lil busy beaver. http://twitter.com/mackabean Sounds like a professional protestor if I have the right gentleman. I hope I get to drive the tractor when we all live together on the farm.........

I mean, who has actually measured the average fecal volume of elephant cars and AMS offices?

But seriously...

People shouldn't use anecodatal evidence in an attempt to prove or disprove climate change. Yep, we had tornaodes in January. Weird, but not impossible. Okay, it got really cold last year. Whatever.

I think the baseline has moved. Yeah, it's almost nothing. But I personally think cold air streaming out of Greenland due to slightly higher ocean temperature has nudged the jet stream a wee bit and made it slightly more erratic. Emphasis on I think.

You're not going to see real proof of a trend change without a longer period of observation. It would be like looking at the Nielsen results on Thursday, Comparing them to Wednesday and patting yourself on the back for .1 higher ratings for the first 15 minutes, saying it was because of your special reporting on how weather affects the crispiness of breakfast cereals.

"Forecast the Facts" campaign calls on the AMS Council to offer a full explanation

New Orleans, LA – On Sunday, January 22, the Council of the American Meteorological Society voted to delay passage of its new statement on climate change, deviating from its plans to release a new statement by Feb. 1, 2012. Daniel Souweine, director of the Forecast the Facts campaign—a new initiative to hold T.V. meteorologists accountable on climate change reporting—said this in response: “The AMS Council is calling this a ‘routine’ delay. But the statement is taking considerably longer than expected, and members of their drafting committee have threatened to resign. Something isn’t adding up.”

Forecast The Facts staff attended the Council meeting, where AMS Council member Peter Lamb explained that the Council had sent the statementback to the drafting committee because of unspecified “concerns.” Councilor Lamb indicated that the drafting committee was frustrated by the process, and that multiple committee members had threatened to resign. On Friday, January 20, the AMS posted an update on their blog about the statement’s release.

...

The issue of climate change denial among television weather reporters has gained increasing attention of late, especially with the release of a national study by George Mason University in March 2010. The study found that 63% of T.V. meteorologists think climate change is due to natural causes, and a full 27% think global warming is a scam.

Recent increases in extreme weather have added further impetus for meteorologists to report on climate change. In 2011, the United States experienced a record twelve “billion-dollar” extreme weather events, including flooding from Hurricane Irene, unprecedented tornadoes in the Midwest, and crippling droughts and wildfires in the Southwest. Most scientists believe that climate change exacerbates extreme weather, a conclusion affirmed by the International Panel on Climate Change’s November 2011 report on the subject.

“[People] think of climate change as slow-moving and occurring over extremely long periods of time,” he says, adding that markets therefore “don’t need to concern themselves with it when making short-term economic decisions.”

But he points out that “large-scale changes are occurring so fast” that its impact are measurable “within human life spans” now.

Many analysts see one forecasted effect of climate change — more extreme weather in the form of destructive storms, prolonged droughts and larger seasonal floods — as degrading agricultural productivity.

Several of the tornado outbreaks in the mid-south and Southeast have been nighttime and in the cooler months. It is not unusual at all. A couple of Tulsa's bigger tornadoes in the 70s (when I was REAL little) were in December and we even had one on Christmas Eve... '82 (or somewhere around there) if I recall.

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"What we have here...is a complete lack of respect for the law!" - Sheriff Buford T. Justice

I think the jet stream is shifting its position slightly due to climate change (not unlike a Focault pendulum), but that doesn't mean we have enough data.

I refuse to fall in the trap of letting anecdotal information influence my opinion, but...

Tornado at 5am in January doesn't strike anyone as a wee bit odd?

After I posted that, I was thinking there might be a difference in the Southern tornado patterns than the Midwestern ones (the ones with which I'm familliar).

Overnight tornadoes are still freaky to a guy who's used to them scheduled conveniently during all the prime-time news shows, though. It's kind of like suddenly finding out that in another country sharks can walk on land and attack people at bus stops.

I think the jet stream is shifting its position slightly due to climate change (not unlike a Focault pendulum), but that doesn't mean we have enough data.

I refuse to fall in the trap of letting anecdotal information influence my opinion, but...

Tornado at 5am in January doesn't strike anyone as a wee bit odd?

Anyone who uses one event as evidence for to prove a Theory as Scientific Law needs to stay far, far, far, away from the field of science. I don't care what the theory is.

As for your Jet Stream statement. WTF?!?!?!?!?! Last time I checked, the jet stream is always shifting. Could you elaborate on your point so it makes sense?

Scientific Law: This is a statement of fact meant to describe, in simple terms, an action or set of actions. It is usually accepted to be true and universal, and can sometimes be shown in terms of a single mathematical equation. Scientific laws are very close to mathematical postulates. They don’t really need any complex external proofs; they are accepted at face value based upon the principle that they have always been observed to be true.

More importantly, scientific laws must be simple, true, universal, and absolute. They represent the cornerstone of scientific discovery, because if a law ever did not apply, then all science based upon that law would fall apart.

Some scientific laws, or laws of nature, include the law of gravity, Boyle's law of gases, Newton's laws of motion, the laws of thermodynamics, & Hook’s law of elasticity the law of conservation of mass and energy.

So do we spend billions trying to fix which is essentially (in my opinion) the great unknown.

Interesting article.

‘Nature is about to carry out a very interesting experiment,’ he said. ‘Ten or 15 years from now, we will be able to determine much better whether the warming of the late 20th Century really was caused by man-made CO2, or by natural variability.’

Meanwhile, since the end of last year, world temperatures have fallen by more than half a degree, as the cold ‘La Nina’ effect has re-emerged in the South Pacific.

‘We’re now well into the second decade of the pause,’ said Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. ‘If we don’t see convincing evidence of global warming by 2015, it will start to become clear whether the models are bunk. And, if they are, the implications for some scientists could be very serious.’

The global average surface temperature in 2011 was the ninth warmest since 1880, according to NASA scientists.

The finding continues a trend in which nine of the 10 warmest years in the modern meteorological record have occurred since the year 2000.

The first 11 years of the 21st century experienced notably higher temperatures compared to the middle and late 20th century, Hansen said. The only year from the 20th century in the top 10 warmest years on record is 1998.

Even with the cooling effects of a strong La Nina influence and low solar activity for the past several years, 2011 was one of the 10 warmest years on record.

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Yep. Of course, that's based on "objective" adjustments to all the pre-satellite-era data, which conveniently makes previous warm spells less significant.

If CO2 was the culprit, we should see continuous warming regardless of other factors. But we haven't. Plain and simple. So while Hansen (who was touting a "super Nino" coming on back in the summer...instead of the continuation of La Nina) and whoever else can scream it's a record year all they want, recent trends suggest COOLING.

So, let's see what the cold PDO and AMO shall bring in the next few years.

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In the Ozarks, we get rain, snow, and everything in between. We also call it liquid death, white death, etc.

It's almost like this article was written specially for you! Lots of responses below - some of which are interesting to read.

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Granted...the tapes themselves are your...you own them. But the magic that is on the tapes, that ***ing heart and soul that we put into those tapes - that is ours, and you don't own that! Reed Rothchild

I was jumping on the AGW bandwagon until I got to this paragraph. You lost me at 'modelled what would happen'.

According to New Scientist, in 2010 a team of researcher modelled what would happen if we had a global temperature minimum starting now, and running to 2100. The result? The average global temperature would drop by 0.3C at most.

On the other hand, current estimates for temperature increase due to greenhouse gas emissions are 2-4.5C by 2100. Looking at the two, warming due to greenhouse gasses wins out. In fact, the two results can happily superposed, which means we can say that the smallest change in temperature would then be a 1.7C increase.

I've exhausted my diatribes on AGW, so I'll just pass on what I read recently about a complaint of mets:
"Not enough mention about climate change on forecasts, scientists say"
I cannot recall where I read this, but here goes:
1. Will your ND allot more space for a climate discussion?
2. Will your viewers really care? and finally,
3. It's a WEATHER forecast, not CLIMATE discussion.

"At a time when a substantial portion of the public and even some local TV meteorologists don't believe human activity is affecting the climate, the scientists say their report draws on the latest research to help clear the air.

"We wanted to give a clear view of the science to decision makers, the media, and members of the public," Hosansky said. "And show where the science is and where the science is going." "